Human Rights
at home, abroad and on the way...
Human Rights
at home, abroad and on the way...
About two weeks ago, in mid-March, one of our colleagues received a message from a Thai journalist asking “Do you think that sex workers will be more vulnerable to trafficking now that the Thai government ordered all entertainment places shut?” In our office WhatsApp chat group, we joked “Well, this [linking COVID-19 to trafficking] didn’t take long”.
Women migrant workers experience a continuum of gender-based violence and harassment, ranging from insults to severe physical abuse, sexual assault, psychological abuse, bullying and intimidation.
This gender-based violence cannot be considered in isolation from the patriarchal stereotypes about women’s place in society, the value of their labour, and the violence that women are subjected to throughout their lives.
Women migrant workers across Latin America endure extreme violence in order to be able to provide for their families, according to research carried out among workers in the garment, domestic, service, sex and hawking sectors.
Economic precarity was the driving factor for accepting poverty wages and poor working conditions:
All participants said that the constant economic instability and job insecurity in which they find themselves makes them accept conditions that in another context they would never have imagined enduring.
The research aimed to explore gender-based violence in the world of work from the perspective of women migrant workers. The 172 women interviewed by eight Latin American civil society organisations reported experiencing a spectrum of violence and discrimination, through dynamics created by patriarchal societies and families, racism and xenophobia and an entrenched neoliberal capitalist economy. This is creating a ‘new normal’ of permanent precarity through a lack of social coverage, poverty wages, exploitative working conditions and job insecurity.
Leah Sullivan
Thirty years ago, the village of Pastapur was struggling. Dalit and Adivasi (indigenous) people who lived there did so in poverty, surviving from tiny plots of inhospitable land. Many more were landless agricultural labourers, eking out a living from neighboring farms. Hunger was a constant threat, and young people left for life in the city. Today, this has all changed.
Sixty CSO activists, trade unionists and representatives of migrant rights, women’s rights, worker rights and Dalit and Adivasi rights groups across India met over three days in August 2019 to think collectively about how a cross-sectoral movement could address the systemic issues faced by women migrant workers in the country.
The meeting, co-organised by GAATW, SEWA[i] and MAKAAM[ii], looked holistically at the rights of women migrant workers by analysing the structural drivers of outmigration from the states of Odisha, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh. These are states of origin for internal women migrant workers going into some of the sectors with the lowest pay and poorest working conditions, including domestic work, brick kiln work, garment work, construction work and sex work.
Our discussions drew a challenging overall picture for our movements in India today: a growing asymmetry of power between employers and workers, persistent patriarchal norms and attitudes, a political economy tilted in favour of the interests of big corporations over the rights of small-scale landowners and workers.
